Words Beginning with "r" that open up other worlds.

Often when you study words, you are just so grateful to learn the meaning of the difficult ones on your plate that you don't realize that almost every word, like single women at concerts, brings a companion with them. In this essay I will look at four "r" words: rabanna, rampallion, raguly, and raduliform and not only try to open the world of each word but show how each word brings along a companion for the ride.

1. Let's begin easily, with rampallion. It is, as the Century says, a vague term of contempt, similar to rapscallion and rumgallion. Thus, a rampallion is a rapscallion, villain, rascal. As Sir Walter Scott wrote, "I was almost strangled with my own band by twa rampallions, who wanted yestreen...to harle me into a change-house." From 1943: "A rambunctious lad was surely a rampant 'rampallion' in childhood." But we have to turn to Shakespeare to give us a "companion word" for this. Falstaff says, in Henry IV, Pt 2, ii.1.61, "Away you scullian, you rampallian, you fustiliarian." So, here we have another term. A fustilarian is is a "scoundrel." It is similar to a a fustilugs, a person (esp. a woman) of gross or corpulent habit. The word fustilugs was only used for the first time a decade after Shakespeare used fustiliarian. "The country swains contenting themselves though they have not the fairest, take the woodden-fac'd wenches and the ill-favored-foul-fustilugs for a small summe." So, we have rampallion, rapscallion, rumgallion [not in any dictionary I have seen], fustilarian, fustilugs. Beautiful. Then, one more bonus term for us: rumgumtion. It is a Scottish word meaning "common sense," or the same as gumption.

2. With rampallion/fustilarian safely under our belts, let's move to raduliform. It doesn't help us much to know that something raduliform is shaped like a radula, but when we see it means "rasp-like" we are getting somewhere. Well, a radula is a Latin word for "scraper" or "scraping iron" and it can mean either a surgical rasp or, in zoology, "the movable rasping structure in the mouth of many molluscs, bearing chitinous teeth and used for scraping off and drawing in food." Well, here is a nice little picture of the "saw-like" or "rasp-like" ribbon of a mollusc, "used for scraping, cutting and chewing food before it enters the esophagus." It looks more like a saw, a sort of "sciage-type" interior organ, than a rasp. But let's learn it. Well, we learn another word when we see the first use of raduliform in English (about 1850): "The teeth of the Sheat-fish present all the gradations between the villiform and raduliform types." So, a villus is a Latin word for "hair." In anatomy a villus is "a slender hair-like process or minute projection forming one of a number closely set upon a surface." But they are more "firm" than hairs and are identified with very fine teeth of some fish. From Chambers' Cyclopedia, "Crusta Villosa...the fourth Tunic..of the Stomach..On the inner Surface of this Coat, are seen innumerable Villi or Fibrillae." The word fibril in English is a "small fiber." Thus, something villiform is so numerous, slender and closely set (like the teeth of certain fishes) as to resemble the pile of velvet." Once again, words lead to words.

3. The word raguly comes from heraldry and suggests something "ragged," or more precisely, "of a cross..having short, oblique projections like sawn-off branches." Or, again, "having alternate projections and depressions like a battlement, but set obliquely." We need some pictures to help us. Raguly is pictured here. You see the projections above and below the solid red field; the projections are set obliquely and not at right angles to the field. Note that the definition given is that it "looks like a skewed version of embattled. To be embattled, pictured here, means to look like the "battlement" of a castle. If something is counterembattled, it means that one has square projections at the top and bottom of the field. Now we see why raguly is defined as "oblique" projections--a sort of skewed counterembattled shape. As with most heraldic terms, raguly is used "postpositively"--or after the word it modifies. "Staff ragulee sable." Or, from 1872: "a crucifix attached to a cross raguly." Or, from the Times in 1937: "May we assume, then, that the flag of the Basque army is white, bearing a green saltire raguly?" As you may know, a saltire is a diagonal cross, also called the St. Andrew's Cross or crux decussata, pictured here. Take it slowly, and the entire world opens to you.

4. Rabanna is a Madagascar coarse woven fabric used especially for hats and bags. The word rabanna is of uncertain origin. Another word used to describe rabanna is raffia. Raffia is a fiber-yielding palm cultivated in Madagascar. Here is a picture with description of a textile woven from raffia fibers produced by Sakalava women along the east coast of Madagascar. Both men and women used it to cover themselves. Rougher fabrics, we are told, were used for more utilitarian purposes.

Conclusion

Not every word, of course, is suggestive of another that is just as obscure (though precise and needed). Let's close with a "bonus" word that seems to stand, as it were, on its own. It is reckling. The origin is uncertain, but it describes either the youngest or weakest of a litter or a group of brothers and sisters. Tennyson knew the word, in Vivien: "On returning found/ Not two but three [babes]; there lay the reckling, one/ But one hour old! What said the happy sire?" Or, from a few years later, "John was Rachel's elder by ten years; he was the first-born of his mother, and she was her little reckling." Often more affection is bestowed on the reckling than on the older children...

Let that suffice us for another "meal..."

3873